I'm an Assistant Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, a Research Fellow with the Oakland, California-based Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics. I'm on Twitter: @artcarden.

Let's Be Blunt: It's Time to End the Drug War

April 20 is the counter-culture “holiday” on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs—especially marijuana—be legal? The answer is “yes.” Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It’s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren’t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.

For the sake of the argument, let’s go ahead and assume that everything you’ve heard about the dangers of drugs is completely true. That probably means that using drugs is a terrible idea. It doesn’t mean, however, that the drug war is a good idea.

Prohibition is a textbook example of a policy with negative unintended consequences. Literally: it’s an example in the textbook I use in my introductory economics classes (Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles of Economics if you’re curious) and in the most popular introductory economics textbook in the world (by N. Gregory Mankiw).The demand curve for drugs is extremely inelastic, meaning that people don’t change their drug consumption very much in response to changes in prices. Therefore, vigorous enforcement means higher prices and higher revenues for drug dealers. In fact, I’ll defer to Cowen and Tabarrok—page 60 of the first edition, if you’re still curious—for a discussion of the basic economic logic:

The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It’s hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her.

People associate the drug trade with crime and violence; indeed, the newspapers occasionally feature stories about drug kingpins doing horrifying things to underlings and competitors. These aren’t caused by the drugs themselves but from the fact that they are illegal (which means the market is underground) and addictive (which means demanders aren’t very price sensitive).

Those same newspapers will also occasionally feature articles about how this or that major dealer has been taken down or about how this or that quantity of drugs was taken off the streets. Apparently we’re to take from this the idea that we’re going to “win” the war on drugs. Apparently. It’s alleged that this is only a step toward getting “Mister Big,” but even if the government gets “Mister Big,” it’s not going to matter. Apple didn’t disappear after Steve Jobs died. Getting “Mr. Big” won’t win the drug war. As I pointed out almost a year ago, economist and drug policy expert Jeffrey Miron estimates that we would have a lot less violence without a war on drugs.

At the recent Association of Private Enterprise Education conference, David Henderson from the Naval Postgraduate School pointed out the myriad ways in which government promises to make us safer in fact imperil our safety and security. The drug war is an obvious example: in the name of making us safer and protecting us from drugs, we are actually put in greater danger. Without meaning to, the drug warriors have turned American cities into war zones and eroded the very freedoms we hold dear.

Freedom of contract has been abridged in the name of keeping us “safe” from drugs. Private property is less secure because it can be seized if it is implicated in a drug crime (this also flushes the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty” out the window). The drug war has been used as a pretext for clamping down on immigration. Not surprisingly, the drug war has turned some of our neighborhoods into war zones. We are warehousing productive young people in prisons at an alarming rate all in the name of a war that cannot be won.

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By this definition, the drug war is insane. We are no safer, and we are certainly less free because of concerted efforts to wage war on drugs. It’s time to stop the insanity and end prohibition.

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I’m not trying to insult you, but I’m fairly certain you missed the point of legalization. The fact of the matter is that it’s not working. With a concept so simple to grasp it seems to have slipped so easily out of your hands. You have to look at the other countries that have moved forward and legalized drugs. No one’s opinions change on specific drugs. Only the crime is put to a halt because they have no market now. And it has nothing to do with being unjust, I think the point was that it is unethical. You can’t tell someone what not to ingest in their body, especially something as benign as marijuana. And do you know anything about DARE? DARE is a waste of money, and an easy day on the job for a cop. Try to be a little more open minded you might get a little farther.

No one is saying it isn’t against the law, what on earth are you blathering on about? Nothing positive has come from the “war on drugs” that’s the main point. The second point is that marijuana is harmless, so drugs aren’t all bad. Work on your reading comprehension skills.

Most of what you wrote is outright illogical. Firstly, any state can put any words into a law and make something punishable by imprisonment. Like, for example, being a Christian in a communist country. Just and unjust are philosophical and not merely legal terms. Appeal to authority is a texbook fallacy.

The war on drugs wastes incredible amounts of money and puts people in jail who are sometimes mere users of marijuana. I find that appalling. Missing children, murderers, sex slaves, abusers and thieves abound – I’d rather have the police getting them off the streets than arrestubg a 20 year old smoking a joint to relax.

You don’t seem to understand the big picture. Yes, illegal drugs are illegal….but is it worth it to have all illegal drugs continue to be illegal? There are pros and cons each decision to make a drug illegal – whether you understand that or not. At one time alcohol was illegal, but now it is not because we decided that the cons outweighed the pros.

It seems like you are saying that nothing should change because everything is exactly perfect right now and all the right decisions have been made.

I recommend you look at the facts of how much money has been spent, how many people have been jailed, how many people have been killed and what we accomplish by doing that.

In both the slavery and sodomy cases you cite, the laws were either specifically overturned by legislation or deemed “un-enforceable” due to privacy violations that would be required to insure compliance.

I would like you to cite the data on D.A.R.E and the “drug consumption increase”. Your attempts to insinuate “cause” when most likely “correlation” can only be assigned seems dubious to me.

I don’t get the same read from the statement “THEY WOULDNT have jobs now, the unemployment levels would be just that much greater” [sic] as you insinuate that poster has/had. I think it’s clear from this statement that they believe the user/abuser wouldn’t have a job. Therefore, it follows that the unemployment rate would be higher. I see no recommendation towards incarceration as a means of solving rising unemployment, as you suggest.

Being locked in a cage for using a substance that harms no one but yourself is absolutely unjust. The fact that you seem to have contempt for anyone who disagrees with that based on the ‘it’s a law’ argument’ is laughable. I would encourage you to look up the vast collection of ridiculous us and state laws that are still in effect that don’t get enforced. just google it.

It also disgusts me that you tout around the blame the victim mentality. “it’s your choice…you should’ve listened to dare” When you say things like that it shows that you really have zero clue what drug addiction is like, how it starts, and you’d rather throw people under the bus than try to understand their problems.

If you want to base what you think is just and unjust around whatever the current U.S. policy is then I would say YOUR life is beyond sad. And you might consider getting an education in the real world and not relying on what your dare officer said in your classroom.

You, sir, are the only sad sad person on here. Get bent, have fun living in fear, and sorry to hear you’re so idiotic that you think prohibition is a good thing. Let’s add the known facts that your angry self missed out on the last 50 years: Never killed a single person and is not possible to die from THC consumption. The first laws about marijuana were ordering farmers to grow crops since it is the most robust and strongest natural fiber on earth. They essentially outlawed it for the same reason it was considered illegal (ref: “The Union” by National Geographic) It is a saving grace for people who suffer from a variety of illnesses and disease from Chrone’s disease to glaucoma, to chemo patients. The number of crimes committed under the influence of marijuana since prohibition started is so miniscule that it is dismissed by congress as an actual stat. It’s been around longer than democracy or your fear of anything the feds cram down your throat.

In case you haven’t noticed, this land of the free-credit-denial is beyind bankrupt, same as Britain, only thery admit it and don’t keep adding debt, and the amount of tax money used to prosecute and house simple non-violent people who happen to have a plant on them is ridiculous. It’s also the countries largest cash crop yet still illegal on a federal level. If legalized and regulated like any other substance such as tobacco (142,000 deatsh a year) and alcohol (similar staggering number) would generate an estimated 12 billion, yes billion, dollars of free and clear revenue a year (what recession?) People like you are what is wrong with this country, you are so ignorant you think you need to be babied and have laws to protect you from YOURSELF since you clearly lack the ability to think for yourself and just buy up whatever you are told to support whichever political agenda is pressing at the time. All the one-sided facts aside, it’s human nature to rebel, if you ban it, people will be drawn to it like we all do as teenagers, but bottom libne: IT’S YOUR BODY AND YOUR HUMAN RIGHT TO DO WITH IT AS YOU WISH IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME! Don’t smoke and drive or operate machinery, use your head, and have a nice day. Oh, and Happy 4/20, Negative Nancy.

It’s an unjust law. Yelling that it’s “THE LAW” (yes, even if you use all caps) does not make your argument convincing, because this article didn’t say that it was unjust enforcement–it said the laws themselves were unjust. You’re arguing about something that no one else is talking about, here–whether stupid laws should be followed just because they are laws. Apparently, you believe they should be. That’s great. The rest of us are talking about how this law is harmful, stupid and useless and discussing the need for it to be repealed.